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Wordpress News & Tips

Wordpress news and tips that can help you make the most of your self-hosted Wordpress website. We will offer tips to keep your website fast and secure, offering recommendations for plugins that are must- haves and offer inspiration to keep your website updated to improve engagement! Have a specific question or would like us to cover a specific Wordpress related topic? Contact us here and let us know!

This post is being written using Gutenberg - I will give you my honest thoughts at the end of this post. This is the first attempt at using Gutenberg in the last 2 months or so. My first try with it - I hated it on every level.
It sounds like Wordpress 5.0 is coming soon to a Wordpress near you.
Unless you have been under a rock - this is the release that will include Gutenberg as the core editor for your Wordpress website.
On October 2, 2018, Matt Mullenweg announced that he ... READ FULL ARTICLE

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is no in effect!
And while we are promoting the important of this new law - we want to stress that you should not be terrified or overwhelmed with the process. The EU will not stop the world on May 28, 2018 and hand out fines world wide - but you do want to address the issues as soon as you can.
This is NOT a thoroughly detailed all-inclusive article as there are many variables that come into play as every website is different in the data they ... READ FULL ARTICLE

Wordpress - why oh why must you make this change? As a group that specifically offers Wordpress Web Design services - this update is making us nervous! Because of our unique development on the back-end we are carefully assessing how this will affect out clients. If you are a 2 Dogs Media client, please be sure to read the bottom of this post!
You may have heard all the rumblings out there about a new content editor that is coming to Wordpress! It will be dropping in a core Wordpress update ... READ FULL ARTICLE

We have seen so many discussions lately on a variety of groups and forums and wanted to create a general guideline that we will hope clarify how to manage your Wordpress posts in regards to categories, posts and other archives.
Overview
What Is A Category/Category Archive?
Categories are used to group your content into a "main topic", for example if you are a car blog you may have a category for each car manufacturer. The goal of categories is to help your readers find the content they are ... READ FULL ARTICLE

This post is being written in response to some major issues we have been seeing on new client websites! Many of our new clients are coming with more plugins and themes installed than we can count - and sadly they were never made aware of the issues that could come from this.
One client had 3 different plugins activated that did the same thing - they were all drag and drop builders, which we are not fans of in the first place - but when they could no longer see their edit page screen they came ... READ FULL ARTICLE

UPDATED 8/30/17! A reader just let us know that the noreferrer issue has been fixed! TinyMCE no longer forces noreferrer to be attributed to external links that open in new tabs!
UPDATED! So there is finally confirmed word from Amazon!
So there is a lot of scary thoughts out there about the newly implemented code in Wordpress websites that forces your links to have "noopener noreferrer" in them and we wanted to try and clear it up the best we can without being too technical.
First, ... READ FULL ARTICLE

Just within the last week we have seen 3 issues with different website owners that have utilized a ThemeForest theme on their Wordpress website. Each issue was unique - but the common factor with all the issues was the themes they were using - all purchased from ThemeForest. We believe Wordpress companies have an obligation to provide clean, well coded-themes to their customers - but when it comes to ThemeForest, this is not always what you are getting.
That is what prompted us to write this ... READ FULL ARTICLE

"Let's install a plugin for that."
That is one of those phrases that make us cringe every time we hear it. Yes, Wordpress makes it super easy to add certain functionality with the use of plugins, but what is the trade off to those plugins?
Choosing plugins should not be taken lightly! The wrong plugin choice can break a website, get you hacked or give you a website that loads super slow.
There are an awful lot of plugins out there as you can see below -- just over 49K Wordpress plugins ... READ FULL ARTICLE

So AMP this - AMP that, we have all been hearing about this AMP stuff but still do not really understand what it is or how it can help your website.
Well, we have a short case study that we hope will enlighten you as to why you should implement AMP. A special thank you to Carol at Fidose of Reality for being our "guinea pig" for this and allowing us to show her data so you can see the impact AMP can have!
IMPORTANT NOTE: This is a general overview to give you an idea of what CAN happen if ... READ FULL ARTICLE

One of the things we here at 2 Dogs Media pride ourselves on the most is our ability to create user and administrative friendly websites for non profits. Sadly, we think the administrative area is a part of the website that many web agencies do not put enough time or effort into.
Wordpress by default is fairly easy to use with its easy administrative admin and WYSIWYG editors for the pages and posts area. But what happens when you have a page that requires a lot of different features and ... READ FULL ARTICLE

A big part of our client base is using our SEO Services and for that part of our business we recommend our clients use Yoast SEO to simplify their on-site search engine optimization.
It really does make the whole SEO thing so much easier - really it does.
But the Yoast Focus Keyword Tool with their green, yellow and red dot seem to be causing grief for some users in understanding why they are or are not ranking. We wanted to showcase why we believe the Yoast focus keyword should not be a ... READ FULL ARTICLE

The Good
Yeah, we got mentioned in a Tweet - admit it, we all love to be noticed. But today kind of threw me for a loop. I saw this tweet and of course was happy - I liked it, I retweeted it and threw a tweet back thanking them, you know because good social manners are important!
The Bad
After all this was said and done, for some reason I was inclined to click the link - even though I can see what they shared - I was drawn to that little ow.ly link that was screaming CLICK ME. So I did ... READ FULL ARTICLE